Debian wheezy is awesome :)
I've never really tried pure debian before, and definitely never considered using it as my main desktop operating system, but I recently gave the newly released wheezy a try and am loving it
It is a little trickier to install and setup than ubuntu (but not really that difficult at all, I found the installer to be straightforward enough and things worked reasonable well out of the box in debian. I did have to make a few tweaks that I don't need to do in ubuntu such as adding my user to the sudo group, adding myself to the lpadmin group, installing system-config-printer, and tweaking font rendering so it doesn't suck).
The thing that suprised me most was how well wheezy works for multimedia. Out of the box it played mp3, aac, and h.264, this is even better multimedia support than ubuntu has out of the box! I wish more distros would follow suit here.
The desktop is very stable and quick, it seems lighter than any other full gnome distros that I've used. The version of gnome it comes with is kind of old already, but I've actually come to really appreciate that it comes with gnome-shell 3.4. IMO gnome 3.4 has been the only gnome 3.x release thats been fully usable and doesn't have a bunch of annoying bugs (for example gnome 3.6 has a lot of weird little issues with network shares, like randomly crashing when mounting/unmounting them or sometimes giving pointless gvfs errors when unmounting shares. ubuntu's patched nautilus 3.6 is even worse, its introduced a bug that upstream nautilus doesn't have where it randomly "loses" my bookmarked shares. And nautilus 3.8 has a bug where it randomly crashes gnome-shell and sometimes even totally crashes gnome). Wheezy's gnome 3.4 desktop has been super solid for me, I've noticed no annoying problems with gnome-shell or nautilus. And honestly after using debian's gnome 3.4 for a week I can't think of a single thing I really miss in 3.6 or 3.8 that really compels me to upgrade from gnome 3.4.
Everything that I use this laptop for is working wonderfully in debian 7, and I've had yet to run into annoying "showtopper" bugs that I've constantly been hitting with all other recent distros. I think I can finally stop distro hopping for now, and I can wait things out in stable debian land until unity-next, gnome-shell, kde etc... become bug free enough for me to use without pulling my hair out
The only problem I had with wheezy is that it came with a very old kernel that hates my ivybridge graphics, and the system would randomly lock up. luckily compiling kernel 3.8 sorted that out for me, and now all my hardware (brightness keys, card reader, etc..) works just as well in debian as it does in 13.04, and an official kernel 3.8 backport should be available soon.
I didn't expect debian to be a good "desktop" experience, but was pleasantly surprised. Its been too long since I used a distro where everything actually "works".
After some tweaking I have a very pleasent looking desktop too:
Last edited by screaminj3sus; May 20th, 2013 at 07:15 PM.
Desktop: Windows 8 x64 | Intel Core i5-2500 | 16 GB DDR3 1333 | ATI 6950 2gb | 64gb Vertex 2/320gb/750gb/1tb hdd
Laptop: System76 Lemur Ultra | Xubuntu 13.04 x64 | 2.5Ghz Intel Core i5-3210m | 8GB DDR31600 | Intel HD4000 | 500GB 7200rpm hybrid hdd
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